Hear It, Think It, Say It - A Blending Activity

Objective

SWBAT hear segmented sounds, blend the sounds together, and state the entire word.

Big Idea

Segmenting words into individual sounds is an important skill in learning how to read, but students also need to be able to hear individual sounds and blend them back together to state a whole word. This activity will help your students do just that.

Teacher Background Knowledge and Preparation

I have posted many segmenting activities already and stressed the importance of doing phonemic awareness each day. Segmenting and blending go hand in hand. In most of my lessons, I have students segment the word first and then we blend it back together. Today we are mixing it up for a change of pace. Today I am giving students the segmented pieces of the word. They will have to listen to each sound, process the separate sounds, blend them back together in their head, and then tell me what the whole word is. When students blend, they are addressing standards RF1.2, and RF1.2b.

Students will still have the opportunity to segment in this lesson. They will use tokens to push for the individual sounds in each word and then make and write the letter association with each sound in the phonics portion of the lesson, thus addressing standards RF1.2d and RF1.3.

Finally, students will complete a sentence dictation where they will have to write the words from the lesson that have a pattern as well as sight word vocabulary. When writing this sentence dictation students will be addressing standards RF1.1, and RF1.1a.

For today's lesson you will need either the Smartboard Phoneme Segmentation Boxes.notebookor Activboard Phoneme Segmentation Boxes.flipchart lesson for the phonics portion of the lesson. You will also want to make copies of the Phonics practice sheet Phoneme Segmentation Boxes.pdf for each student in your class. For today's lesson, I am using the Scope and Sequence from my reading series. We happen to be working on words with ending blends today. You can do this lesson with any of the phonics lessons in your reading series. Before you have students work with letters, make sure they work on the words phonemically first. If you don't have a phonics program, or if your reading series doesn't have a phonics component, I've included two resources here Phonics_Scope__Sequence.pdf and here Journeys_Scope-Sequence_2014_gradesK-6.pdf from reading series that I know are Common Core aligned. You can use their scope and sequences if you'd like.

Journeys_Scope-Sequence_2014_gradesK-6.pdf

Phoneme Segmentation Boxes.notebook

Phoneme Segmentation Boxes.flipchart

Phoneme Segmentation Boxes.pdf

Phonics_Scope__Sequence.pdf

Sound Automaticity and Modeling Section (I Do)

5 minutes

The very first thing we do in each of our phonics lessons each day is to review our letters and sounds by doing a flashcard pack with our sound spelling cards. I use the cards that come with our reading series, but if you don't have a set, you can print some out here. I quickly say the letter, key word, then the sound. Then the students repeat after me. I want my students to be able to make the association between letter and sound quickly, so when they decode they won't have to spend large amounts of time mentally retrieving the sound when they see a letter. This will help with fluency because you have helped students to free up their "mental deskspace." Once students have mastered basic sounds such as consonants, I take those out of our pack and then we only work on other graphemes such as ai, sh, and aw.

After we went through our flashcard pack I said, "Today we are going to do something different. Most of the time I tell you the whole word, and you segment the word into the individual phonemes. Then we blend the word back together. Today, I am going to give you the individual phonemes and you will listen carefully. You will then blend those phonemes back together in your head. When you are thinking, you will point at your head and when I say, Word? you will tell me what the word is. Let's do one together."

I said, "Now listen carefully, /f/ /a/ /s/ /t/. Now everyone point at your head while you think. Now I say, word?" Then I put my hand out to signal that I wanted their response. Then my students told me the word fast.

I said, "Now that you know what to do, let's blend some more words together."

Segmenting Our Words Orally

I had my list of words that my students would be writing in the phonics portion of the lesson. I knew my students needed to blend the individual phonemes together orally first. I had the list in one hand and then worked along my students.

I said each phoneme in the word. After I said each phoneme I pointed at my head, so my students would mirror me. I gave my students about 2-3 seconds to process and think. Then I said, "Word?" and the students told me the word. You can see how my class did this routine by watching the video here Hear Think Say.m4v .

Hear Think Say.m4v

Taking It To the Phonics Level

20 minutes

Now it was time to take those exact same words that we had blended and learn how to associate the sounds of the language with the letter representations. In this part of the lesson we segment the sounds using sound boxes and tokens. Each of my students has 5 tokens and they use them to segment and write each sound in the word. You can see how we segment our words and write them in this video here Tapping and Mapping sounds Ending Blends.mp4 .

After we practice tapping and spelling our words, we practice our sight word vocabulary and then complete a sentence dictation that utilizes both our sight word vocabulary and the words that we segmented and spelled (our patterned words). You can see how I teach my students how to do a sentence dictation in this video here Rereading Strategy Ending Blends.mp4 .

Rereading Strategy Ending Blends.mp4

Tapping and Mapping sounds Ending Blends.mp4

Closure

2 minutes

I asked my students, "Why is it important that we be able to blend phonemes together?" Then I have them go back and look at some of the patterned words we've mapped out. I ask them questions such as "What is the 2nd grapheme in that word? What is the 3rd grapheme? What is the ending blend in that word? How many blends does that word have? I want my students to not only be able to decode and spell, I also want them to have the conceptual knowledge involved with learning how to read.